Burned

Chapter Twenty-Three

Rephaim
Rephaim felt her anger and wondered if he would be able to tell whether or not it was directed at him.
He purposely focused his thoughts on Stevie Rae, allowing the blood thread that tied them to strengthen.
More anger. It poured through their bond, and the force of her ire surprised him though he could feel that she was attempting to hold herself in check.
No. Her fury wasn't aimed at him. Someone else was rousing her - someone else was the focus of her aggression.
He pitied the poor fool. Had he been a lesser being, he would have laughed sardonically and wished the hapless fellow well.
It was time he put Stevie Rae out of his mind.
Rephaim kept flying east, tasting the night with his powerful wings, reveling in his freedom.
He didn't need her now. He was whole. He was strong. He was himself again.
Rephaim didn't need the Red One. She was only the vessel through which he'd been saved. The truth was her reaction to seeing him whole again proved theirs was a tie that needed to be severed.
Rephaim slowed, feeling unexpectedly weighed down by his thoughts. He landed on a gentle rise of land covered by old pin oaks. Standing on the little hillock, he gazed back the way he'd come, considering
Why did she reject me?
Had he frightened her? That didn't seem possible. She'd seen him whole when he'd entered the circle.
He'd been fully healed when he'd faced Darkness.
For her he'd faced Darkness!
Absently, Rephaim reached back and rubbed at the base of his wings. His skin felt smooth under his fingers. There was no physical wound left. Stevie Rae had completely healed him from Darkness's wrath.
And then she'd turned from him as if she'd suddenly seen him as a monster and not a man.
But I am not a man! Thoughts blasted through Rephaim's mind. She knew what I was! Why turn from me after everything we've been through?
Her behavior utterly baffled him. She'd called for him when she'd been in terror for her life -  frightened beyond thinking, Stevie Rae had called for him.
He'd answered her call and gone to her, saved her.
I claimed her as my own.
And then, weeping, she'd run away from him. Yes, he'd seen her tears, but he hadn't known what he'd done to cause them.
With a deep cry of frustration, he threw his hands in the air, as if to rid himself of even the thought of her, and moonlight glinted off his palms. Rephaim stilled. Holding his arms out, he looked at them as if seeing them for the first time. He had a man's arms. She'd held his hands. He'd even cradled her in his arms, though it had only been briefly as they'd escaped immolation on the rooftop. His skin was really no different than hers. His was browner, perhaps, but only a little. And his arms were strong . . . well made
By all the gods, what was wrong with him? It didn't matter what his arms looked like. She would never truly be his. How could he even imagine it? It was beyond all thoughts - beyond even the wildest of his dreams.
Unbidden, the words of Darkness echoed through his mind: You are your father's son. Like him, you have chosen to champion a being who can never give you what it is you seek most.
"Father championed Nyx," Rephaim spoke to the night. "She rejected him. And now I, too, have championed one who rejects me."
Rephaim launched himself into the sky. His wings beat up, up. He wanted to touch the moon - that crescent that symbolized the Goddess who had broken his father's heart and set about the sequence of events that created him. Perhaps if he reached the moon, its Goddess would give him an explanation that would make sense - that would be balm to his heart, because Darkness was correct. What I seek most, Stevie Rae can never give me.
What I seek most is love . . .
Rephaim couldn't speak the word aloud, but even the thought burned him. He had been conceived in violence through a mixture of lust and fear and hate. Most of all hate, always hate.
His wings stroked the sky, lifting him ever upward.
Love couldn't be possible for him. He shouldn't even want it - shouldn't even think of it.
But he did. Since Stevie Rae had touched his life, Rephaim had begun to think of love.
She'd shown him kindness, and he'd never before known kindness.
She'd been gentle with him, bandaging his wounds and tending his body. He'd never been cared for
before the night she'd helped him out of the freezing, bloody darkness. Compassion . . . she'd brought compassion into his life.
And he'd never known laughter before he knew her.
Staring up at the moon, beating the wind with his wings, he thought of her incessant babble and the way her eyes sparkled with humor at him, even when he didn't know what he'd done to amuse her, and he had to choke back unexpected laughter.
Stevie Rae made him laugh.
She hadn't seemed to care that he was the powerful son of an indestructible immortal. Stevie Rae had ordered him around as if he was anyone else in her life - anyone who was normal, mortal, capable of love and laughter and real emotions.
But he did have real emotions! Because Stevie Rae made him feel.
Had that been her plan all along? When she'd freed him from the abbey, she'd said he had a choice to make. Was this what she'd meant - that he could choose a life where laughter and compassion and perhaps even love truly existed?
Then what about his father? What if Rephaim chose a new life, and Kalona returned to this world?
Perhaps that was something he should worry about when it happened. If it happened.
Before he knew what he was doing, Rephaim slowed. He couldn't touch the moon; it was as impossible as it was for a creature such as he to be loved. And then Rephaim realized he was no longer flying to the east. He'd circled and was retracing his path. Rephaim was returning to Tulsa.
He tried not to think as he flew. He tried to keep his mind utterly clear. He wanted only to feel the night under his wings - to have the cool, sweet air brush his body.
But Stevie Rae intruded again.
Her sadness reached him. Rephaim knew she was crying. He could feel her sobs as if they were in his own body.
He flew faster. What had made her weep? Was she crying because of him again?
Rephaim flew past Gilcrease without hesitating. She wasn't there. He could feel that she was away, farther to the south.
It was as his wings beat the night air that Stevie Rae's sadness changed, shifting into something that at first confused him, and then when Rephaim realized what it was, his blood boiled.
Desire! Stevie Rae was in the arms of someone else!
Rephaim didn't stop to think like a creature of two worlds who was neither man nor beast. He didn't remember that he'd been born from rape and sentenced to know nothing except Darkness and violence and service to his hate-driven father. Rephaim didn't think at all. He only felt . If Stevie Rae gave herself to another, he would lose her forever.
And if he lost her forever, his world would go back to the dark, lonely, joyless place it had been before he'd known her.
Rephaim couldn't bear that.
He didn't call on his father's blood to lead him to Stevie Rae. Rephaim did the opposite. From deep within him, he conjured an image of a sweet-faced Cherokee maiden who hadn't deserved to die in a flood of blood and pain. Keeping the girl he'd dreamed as his mother in his mind, he flew on instinct, following his heart.
Rephaim's heart led him to the depot.
The sight of the place sickened him. Not simply because he remembered the rooftop and how close Stevie Rae had come to death. He hated the place because he could feel her there - inside - under the earth, and he knew she was in another's arms.
Rephaim tore the grate from the opening. Without hesitation, he strode through the basement. Following the link that bound him to her, he entered the familiar tunnels. His breath came hard and fast. His blood pounded through his body, fueling his anger and despair.
When he finally found her, the boy was atop her, rutting against Stevie Rae, oblivious to everything else in the world. What a fool he was. Rephaim should have hurled him from her. He wanted to. The Raven Mocker in him wanted to slam the fledgling against the wall again and again until he was battered and bloody and no longer a threat.
The man within him wanted to weep.
Flooded with feelings he could neither understand nor control, he found himself frozen in place, staring, with horror and hatred as well as desire and despair. As he watched, Stevie Rae readied herself to drink the boy's blood, and Rephaim knew two things with utter certainty: first, what she was doing would break their Imprint. Second, he did not want their Imprint to be broken.
Without conscious thought, he shouted, "Do not do this to us, Stevie Rae!"
The boy's response was quicker than Stevie Rae's. He leaped up, pushing her naked body behind him.
"Get the fuck outta here, you freak!" The boy kept himself positioned between Rephaim and Stevie Rae.
The sight of the fledgling shielding her, protecting his Stevie Rae from him , sent a wave of possessive fury through Rephaim.
"Begone, boy! You're not needed here!" Rephaim crouched defensively and began moving slowly toward him.
"What the - ?" Stevie Rae said, shaking her head as if she was trying to clear it while she grabbed Dallas's shirt from the floor and hastily pulled it on to cover herself.
"Stay behind me, Stevie Rae. I won't let it get you."
Rephaim stalked the boy, following him as he moved back, pushing Stevie Rae with him. Rephaim saw
her eyes widen as she peered around the boy and finally truly saw him.
"No!" she cried. "No, you can't be here!"
Her words stabbed him.
"But I am here!" His anger was at the boiling point. The boy kept moving back, keeping Stevie Rae behind him. Following him, Rephaim entered the kitchen. As he did, a flickering motion caught his attention, and he glanced upward.
Darkness writhed in a sick black pool that clung to the ceiling.
Rephaim wrenched his attention back to Stevie Rae and the fledgling. He wouldn't think of Darkness now. He couldn't even consider the possibility that the white bull had returned to claim the rest of his debt.
"Stay back!" the boy cried. Unbelievably, the fledgling made a shooing motion at Rephaim, as if he were an annoying bird that had fluttered into someone's home.
"Sssstep aside! You are keeping me from what's mine!" Rephaim hated to hear the bestial hiss in his voice, but he couldn't help it. The damned boy was pushing him to the edge of his patience.
"Rephaim, just go. I'm fine. Dallas isn't doin' anything bad to me."
"Just go? Leave you?" the words burst from Rephaim. "How can I?"
"You're not supposed to be here!" Stevie Rae shouted, looking like she was on the verge of tears.
"How could I not be? How could you believe I wouldn't know what you were about to do?"
"Get outta here!"
"You mean run away? Like you did from me? No. I won't do that, Stevie Rae. I choose not to do that."
The boy had reached the wall. While he looked from Rephaim to Stevie Rae, he was feeling behind him for cords that poked from a hole that had been chiseled there.
"You know each other. You really do," the boy said.
"Of courssse we do, fool!" Rephaim hissed again, hating the ungovernable beast in his voice.
"How?" The fledgling hurled the word at Stevie Rae.
"Dallas, I can explain."
"Good!" Rephaim shouted as if she'd spoke to him and not the fledgling. "I want you to explain what happened today."
"Rephaim." Stevie Rae looked around Dallas to him and shook her head like she was beyond frustrated.
"This is so not the right time."
"You know each other."
Rephaim noticed the change in the boy's voice before Stevie Rae did. The fledgling's tone had hardened - gone cold and mean. The Darkness above them quivered as if in gleeful anticipation.
"Yeah, okay, we do. But I can explain. See, he - "
"You've been with him all along."
Stevie Rae frowned. "All along? No. It's just that I found him when he was real hurt; I didn't know what - "
"All this time I've been treatin' you like you was some kind of queen or somethin', like you was a real High Priestess," he interrupted Stevie Rae again.
Stevie Rae looked shocked and hurt. "I am a real High Priestess. But like I was tryin' to tell ya, I found Rephaim when he was hurt bad, and I just couldn't let him die."
Taking advantage of the fact that the boy's attention was completely focused on Stevie Rae, Rephaim inched closer.
The Darkness above them thickened.
"He was part of what almost killed you in the circle!"
"He was what saved me in the circle!" Stevie Rae shouted back at Dallas. "If he hadn't shown up, that white bull would've drained me dry."
Her words didn't faze the boy. "You've been keeping this thing a secret. You've been lyin' to everybody!"
"Well, heck, Dallas! I didn't know what else to do!"
"You lied to me, you whore!"
"Don't you dare talk to me like that!" Stevie Rae slapped him. Hard.
Dallas staggered back half a step. "What the fuck has he done to you?"
"You mean besides savin' my life twice? Nothin'!" she yelled.
"He's messed your head up completely!" Dallas yelled. The Darkness above them poured down from the ceiling, like it had suddenly found a weak point in a dam. It slicked around Dallas, covering his head and shoulders, swirling around his waist with a sickening familiarity that reminded Rephaim of razor-edged snakes. But Darkness didn't cut Dallas. Instead, he seemed oblivious to the glistening blackness that now coated him.
"I'm in charge of my own mind. He hasn't done anything to me," Stevie Rae said. Her eyes widened, like she finally noticed the Darkness. She took a step back from the boy, like she didn't want to be tainted by what was touching him. "Dallas, listen to me. Think. You know me. This isn't what it seems."
Rephaim could see the change come over Dallas. It was that withdrawal from him that did it - that coupled with the influence of the Darkness that encased him. Totally incensed, the fledgling screamed,
"He's made you a goddamned whore and a liar! You need some sense knocked into you, girl!" Dallas lifted his hand like he was going to hit Stevie Rae.
Rephaim didn't hesitate. He leaped, closing the space between him and the boy, knocking him away from Stevie Rae and taking his place in front of her.
"Don't hurt him!" Stevie Rae was saying as she grabbed Rephaim's arm and kept him from making another strike against the boy. "He's just freaked-out. He wouldn't really hurt me."
Rephaim let her pull him back. Turning to her, he said, "I think you underestimate the boy."
"She damn sure does," Dallas said grimly.
Rephaim didn't know where the pain came from. He only knew the bright white heat of it. His body convulsed. His back bowed in agony. Dimly, through a graying veil, he could see Dallas, eyes glowing with a scarlet hue that was impossibly bright, holding one of the wires that protruded from the wall.
"Rephaim!" Stevie Rae cried.
She started to reach for him, but then Rephaim saw her pull back. Instead, she ran to Dallas.
"Stop it! Let him go," she told the boy, pulling on his arm.
His blood red eyes skewered her. "I'm gonna fry him. And then whatever weird control he has over you is gonna be gone. You and me can be together, and I won't tell anyone shit about what happened here, long as you're my girl."
With a detached sense of understanding, Rephaim noted that Darkness was no longer present on the boy's body. It had soaked into him - it had claimed him. It augmented whatever strength the fledgling wielded.
Rephaim felt sure Dallas was going to kill him.
"Earth, come to me. I need you."
He heard Stevie Rae's words through the flickering of his consciousness, like she was candlelight trying to reach him through a gale wind. With a mighty effort, Rephaim focused his vision on her. Their eyes met, and her words came to him, suddenly clear and strong and sure.
"Protect him from Dallas because Rephaim belongs to me."
She made a motion toward Rephaim, like she was hurling something at him - and she was. A green glow slammed into his body, throwing him backward and breaking whatever it was that Dallas had been channeling into him. Breathing hard, he lay on the ground, crumpled in a heap, as he absorbed what was becoming the familiar, gentle touch of healing earth.
Dallas turned to Stevie Rae.
"You just said that thing belongs to you."
The fledgling's voice was like death. Rephaim pressed himself against the ground, opening his shocked body to the earth, willing it to enter him - to heal him enough so that he could reach Stevie Rae.
"Yeah. He does. It's hard to explain, and I get that you're pissed. But Rephaim belongs to me." Her eyes skirted Dallas and met his again. "And I guess I belong to him, weird as that sounds."
"It doesn't sound weird. It sounds fucking sick."
Before Rephaim could get to his feet, Dallas pointed a finger at her. There was a deafening crack, and Stevie Rae was suddenly standing in the middle of a glowing green circle. Her brow was furrowed, and she shook her head slowly back and forth. "You tried to shock me? You really wanted to hurt me, Dallas?"
"You chose that thing over me!" he screamed at her.
"I did what I thought was right!"
"You know what, if that's what's right, I don't want nothin' to do with it! I want the opposite!"
As soon as Dallas spoke those words, he cried out and, dropping the wire he'd been clutching in his fist, the fledgling fell to his knees and crumpled, facedown.
"Dallas? Are you okay?" Stevie Rae made a hesitant move toward him.
"Stay away from him," Rephaim rasped as he laboriously gained his feet.
Stevie Rae paused, and then instead of continuing to Dallas, she hurried over to Rephaim, pulling his arm around her shoulders. "Are you okay? You look kinda fried."
"Fried?" Despite everything, she made him want to laugh. "What does that even mean?"
"This." Stevie Rae touched one of the feathers on his chest. He was surprised to see that it looked singed. "You're a little crispy around the edges."
"You touch it. You probably fuck it, too! Damn, I'm glad it stopped me before we finished doin' it. I ain't gonna ever be sloppy seconds to a freak!"
"Dallas, that's just such a load a' - " Stevie Rae began, but when she looked at Dallas, her words stopped short.
"Yeah, that's right. I'm no stupid fledgling anymore," he said.
Brand-new red tattoos in the shape of striking whips framed Dallas's face. Rephaim thought they looked disturbingly like the tendrils of Darkness that had entrapped Stevie Rae and him within the circle. His eyes glowed an even brighter red, and his body seemed to grow larger, swelling with newly gained power.
"Ohmygood ness, " Stevie Rae said. "You've Changed!"
"In a bunch of different ways!"
"Dallas, you gotta listen to me. Remember Darkness? I saw it grab-bin' for you. Please try to think.
Please don't let it get you."
"It get me ? You can say that when you're standing beside that thing? Ah, hell no! I'm never gonna listen to your lies again. And I'm gonna make sure no one else does, either!" He sneered the words at her, his voice filled with anger and hate.
As he stood up and began reaching for the wires he'd used before to channel power, Stevie Rae moved.
Pulling Rephaim with her, Stevie Rae backed from the kitchen. Stepping outside the entrance, she lifted her hand, took a deep breath, and said, "Earth, close this for me, please."
"No!" Dallas yelled.
Rephaim got a brief glimpse of him grabbing the wire and pointing at them, and then with a sound like the soughing of wind through autumn boughs, the earth rained down in front of them, closing the tunnel entrance to the kitchen and shielding them from the wrath of Darkness.
"Can you walk okay?" Stevie Rae asked.
"Yes. I'm not hurt badly. Or at least I'm not anymore. Your earth made sure of that," he said, looking down at her where she stood small, but proud and powerful in the circle of his arm.
"Okay, then. We gotta get outta here." Stevie Rae stepped from his side and began hurrying down the tunnel. "There's another way outta the kitchen. He'll be out in no time, and we need to be gone from here then."
"Why don't you just seal the other exit, too?" he asked as he followed her.
The glance she gave him was visibly annoyed. "What, and kill him? Uh, no. He's not really that bad, Rephaim. He just went nuts 'cause Darkness was messin' with him, and he found out about me and you."
Me and you . . .
Rephaim wanted to hold on to the words that linked them together, but he couldn't. There was no time for such things. Rephaim shook his head. "No, Stevie Rae. Darkness wasn't just messing with him.
Dallas chose to embrace it."
He thought she'd argue with him. Instead, he saw her shoulders slump. She didn't look back at him, but only said, "Yeah, I heard him."
They climbed the ladder silently and were making their way through the basement, when a sound drifted to Rephaim through the wrenched-open gate. He was just thinking that it seemed familiar when Stevie Rae gasped, "He's takin' the Bug!" and she sprinted outside with Rephaim at her heels.
They emerged in time to see the little blue car pulling out of the parking lot.
"Well, that sucks like roadkill," Stevie Rae said.
Rephaim's sharp eyes went to the eastern horizon, which was beginning to go from black to a predawn gray.
"You need to get back into the tunnels," he said.
"Can't. Lenobia and those guys'll be here crazy fast if I'm not back by dawn."
"I will leave," he said. "Return to the Gilcrease. Then you can rest underground, and your friends will find you. You'll be safe."
"What if Dallas is hotfootin' it back to the House of Night? He'll tell them about us."
Rephaim hesitated only for a moment. "Then do what you must. You know where I will be." He turned to leave.
"Take me with you."
Her words made his body freeze. He didn't look at her. "It's close to dawn."
"You're healed, aren't you?"
"I am."
"You're strong enough to fly and carry me?"
"Yes, I am."
"Then take me back to the Gilcrease with you. I'll bet that old place has a basement."
"What about your friends - the other red fledglings?" he said.
"I'll call Kramisha and tell her Dallas has lost his mind, and I'm safe, but not in the tunnels, and that I'll explain stuff tomorrow."
"When they find out about me, it will appear you're choosing me over them."
"What I'm choosing is to take some time to think before I have to deal with the shitstorm Dallas is brewin' up," she said. Then, in a much softer voice, she added, "Unless you don't want me to come with you. You could take off - get outta here - then you won't have to deal with the mess that's comin'."
"Am I or am I not your consort?" Rephaim asked the question before he could stop himself.
"Yes. You are my consort."
He hadn't known he was holding his breath until it left him in a long, relieved sigh. Rephaim opened his arms to her. "Then you should come with me. I will see you rest undisturbed today."
"Thank you," she said, and then Rephaim's High Priestess stepped into his arms. He held her tightly while his powerful wings lifted them into the sky.
Rephaim
Stevie Rae had been right. There was a basement in the old mansion. It had stone walls and a
hard-packed dirt floor, but it was surprisingly dry and comfortable. With a relieved sigh, Stevie Rae settled herself, sitting cross-legged, leaning against the cement wall, and pulled out her cell phone.
Rephaim stood there, not sure what he should do, while she called the fledgling named Kramisha and began a dialogue of hasty and sketchy explanations as to why she wouldn't be returning to the school: Dallas has lost his damn mind . . . electricity must have jacked with his good sense . . . kicked me outta Z's car on the way back to the House of Night . . . no, I'm fine . . . probably be back tomorrow night . . .
Feeling like an interloper, Rephaim left her to talk with her fledgling in privacy. He returned to the attic and paced before the open door of the closet he'd transformed into a nest.
He was tired. Even though he was fully healed, racing the sunrise carrying Stevie Rae had sapped his reserves of strength. He should retreat to the closet and rest during the daylight hours. Stevie Rae wouldn't leave the basement until sunset.
Stevie Rae couldn't leave the basement.
She could be hurt during daylight hours. It was true that the red fledglings were all vulnerable between dawn and dusk, so Dallas wasn't a threat to her until dark. But what if a human stumbled upon her?
Slowly, Rephaim gathered the blankets and food staples he'd accumulated and began carrying them to the basement. It was fully daylight when he made his last trip down the stairs. She'd ended the phone call and was curled up in the corner. Stevie Rae barely stirred when he covered her with a blanket. Then he made himself comfortable beside her. Not so close they were touching, but not so far away that she wouldn't see him immediately when she awoke. And he made sure he was positioned between her and the door. If someone tried to enter, they would have to get through him to reach her.
Rephaim's last thought before he fell asleep was that he finally understood the ever-present sense of rage and restlessness that surrounded his father. Had Stevie Rae truly rejected him today and cast him from her, his world would have forever been colored by the loss of her. And that understanding held more terror for him than the possibility of having to face Darkness again.
I do not want to live in a world without her. Utterly exhausted by feelings he could barely comprehend, the Raven Mocker slept.